Then I recommend you do not build a tesla coil, as (ignoring safety concerns) this circuit at the requires an oscilloscope to debug. Start simple and work on your understanding of electricity and electronics. There are many great beginner projects available. I learned electronics using a 200-in-1 radioshack kit.

There are several tesla coil primary/secondary calculators out there. They are generally fairly accurate and account for more than basic hand calculations generally account for. I did not design my coil very carfully. I just wound a reasonable amount of wire on a 2 inch PVC.I recommend Gbluers specification. It is a bit more effective and efficent for low power tesla coil designs.

If you don't know the pinout, then google the datasheet. It may also have application note and give you example circuits. I do not recommend the DS0026. I only used it since it was what I had available. Any simalar or equivelent MOSFET driver IC should work fine. Plenty of options on Mouser or Digikey.

Then you have did something wrong. Please refer to the troubleshooting guide in the instructable.

Did you watch the tutorial video? I already demonstrated LED's lighting! LED's work best with low current DC at a couple volts with a high impedance supply. Because they only need a few milliamps, you can simply use an antenna and induce a high frequency current in it from/to ground. By means of a rectification with additional diodes, the DC current can power an LED.

Yes but only with modifications. Look at my simple SSTC project for my take on a MOSFET based slayer exciter.Also you may want to learn more about basic electronic theory or building the simple slayer exciter before diving in. Just sayin because otherwise your chances of sucess are smaller than being struck by lighting.

Resistor dividers are a terrible idea. Google Kirchoff's current and voltage law (KCL and KVL.) Also, Thevenin's theorem is also a VERY powerful tool which can help you gain intuition about circuits. This basic electronic theory should answer your question about using resistor dividers as voltage regulators.The PSU question is more tricky. Oftentimes when subjected to electrically noisy circuits or loads that have a tendency to draw a great deal of inrush current. This will "trip a breaker" internally on the PSU, and it will shut down to protect the device it's powering. This is obviously undesirable when powering an SSTC. A "dumb" transformer and rectifier type power supply, or a nice lab bench power supply (with good voltage regulation and an adjustable compliance ...

Resistor dividers are a terrible idea. Google Kirchoff's current and voltage law (KCL and KVL.) Also, Thevenin's theorem is also a VERY powerful tool which can help you gain intuition about circuits. This basic electronic theory should answer your question about using resistor dividers as voltage regulators.The PSU question is more tricky. Oftentimes when subjected to electrically noisy circuits or loads that have a tendency to draw a great deal of inrush current. This will "trip a breaker" internally on the PSU, and it will shut down to protect the device it's powering. This is obviously undesirable when powering an SSTC. A "dumb" transformer and rectifier type power supply, or a nice lab bench power supply (with good voltage regulation and an adjustable compliance current) would be better suited for this task.

I am able to use a 48V 2A supply and achieve results close to what was shown here. The important thing is that the supply does not implement foldback current limiting. If it does then what will likely happen is inrush current to the circuit will cause supply to effectively shut down until the load is removed.

Because it was the convenient MOSFET driver chip I had available. I do not recommend anyone building this project to use this obsolete part. Its hard to source and expensive. You can replace it with a push-pull arrangement of BJTs which performs essentially the same function. (It amplifies current greatly and makes the impedance of the MOSFET gate appear 1+ beta times bigger. (Beta being the current gain of the transistors, which sbould be about 50 to 300)

This circuit is very fiddly, as all of the other people in the comments have had identical issues. I find that the ones on the deadline for some science project with minimal background knowledge in electronics typically fail to get this circuit to function.As a general answer to general requests for help, I point users to the last page of the instructable for troubleshooting, since I assume (given you made no mention of your method to troubleshooting) you did not follow those instructions. Let me know what your results are from attempting each of the steps in the troubleshooting guide, then I might be able to help.------20mF capacitor is huge. I assume you mean μF. It would be more ideal to use film or MLCC capacitors with better ESR/LSR characteristics in parallel with those electro...

This circuit is very fiddly, as all of the other people in the comments have had identical issues. I find that the ones on the deadline for some science project with minimal background knowledge in electronics typically fail to get this circuit to function.As a general answer to general requests for help, I point users to the last page of the instructable for troubleshooting, since I assume (given you made no mention of your method to troubleshooting) you did not follow those instructions. Let me know what your results are from attempting each of the steps in the troubleshooting guide, then I might be able to help.------20mF capacitor is huge. I assume you mean μF. It would be more ideal to use film or MLCC capacitors with better ESR/LSR characteristics in parallel with those electrolytic caps. That high capacitance from those is good for low frequency (60Hz) filtering but useless at filtering higher frequencies this circuit requires. As I mentioned in the troubleshooting guide, a 9V battery will not provide enough current to give good results. 2 standard cells do not provide enough voltage for good results. They will work but expect very poor performance. If you have an old router or toy or something that uses a old-fashioned 9V or 12V wall adaptor capable of a 600mA minimum, then you can use that. However it has to be the heavy blocky type. Modern small / light ones have regulated outputs that shut down when they detect overcurrent. You will still get better performance from a proper lab bench power supply where you can adjust the voltage and current limits freely and independently.

One I picked at random from radioshack. Any high power relay will work until it melts and its contacts get completely destroyed.

Spamming the comments section (esp. the same day) isn't going to result in me replying faster. This old 'able is nothing more than a compilation of methods for driving ignition coils, I have not tested most of the methods myself, either. I have built the relay circuit driver, which was my motivation to create this compilation, as I thought it was a pretty novel and simple yet powerful circuit at the time.

LEDs (all loads) require a voltage potential across the terminals and a current flow in order to glow. LEDs have the additional requirement that they only glow when current flows from anode to cathode. I used what is typically referred to as an "avramenko plug" by the hobbyist community for best results. This arrangement of high speed small signal diodes allows the picked up high frequency electric field generated by the slayer exciter to be rectified and drive current through the LED.One end of the LEDs is connected to a ground, or some body that is capacitively coupled to ground. The end of it connects to an antenna that is brought near the slayer.Trying to power an LED directly from the slayer exciter is much less efficient, and the reverse voltages may damage the LED. You ...

LEDs (all loads) require a voltage potential across the terminals and a current flow in order to glow. LEDs have the additional requirement that they only glow when current flows from anode to cathode. I used what is typically referred to as an "avramenko plug" by the hobbyist community for best results. This arrangement of high speed small signal diodes allows the picked up high frequency electric field generated by the slayer exciter to be rectified and drive current through the LED.One end of the LEDs is connected to a ground, or some body that is capacitively coupled to ground. The end of it connects to an antenna that is brought near the slayer.Trying to power an LED directly from the slayer exciter is much less efficient, and the reverse voltages may damage the LED. You certainly cannot just be holding both terminals of the LED expecting it to glow, there is no voltage across the terminals. That will only work if there is a really strong electric field stimulating the really small die. Even if you hold one end while bringing the other end to the slayer, it will not work very well and may damage the LED. Reason is is because the LED has internal junction capacitance, so forcing an AC voltage across it, this capacitor resists those fast changing voltages, and shorts the AC component to ground (you holding the other end of the LED). If you do get enough voltage across the diode to make it light, the negitive cycles will cause the LED diode to enter reverse breakdown and pontenitally destroy the LED.

What is your depth of knowledge with electricity and electronics? This circuit although it looks simple on paper, it is actually amazingly difficult to get it to work well without really understanding how it works, how to optimize it, etc. You might want to head over to youtube and brush up on some electronics tutorials. I myself have posted a couple totalling 30 minutes. Here is a short list of some things I feel would benefit you:* voltage / current / power / resistance / energy / ohms law / watts law,* complex impedance of capacitors and inductors* the concept of resonant or natural frequency* Parasitic properties of components and construction methods (like different coil designs and such)That is a lot, I hope it does not discourage you.-"following my instructions to the letter...

What is your depth of knowledge with electricity and electronics? This circuit although it looks simple on paper, it is actually amazingly difficult to get it to work well without really understanding how it works, how to optimize it, etc. You might want to head over to youtube and brush up on some electronics tutorials. I myself have posted a couple totalling 30 minutes. Here is a short list of some things I feel would benefit you:* voltage / current / power / resistance / energy / ohms law / watts law,* complex impedance of capacitors and inductors* the concept of resonant or natural frequency* Parasitic properties of components and construction methods (like different coil designs and such)That is a lot, I hope it does not discourage you.-"following my instructions to the letter" is actually not going to get you far with this very fiddly circuit. although that should honestly get you a working result. What assumptions did you make? Any substituted components? I need details to give you better advice.-I assume you blew a capacitor which occurs when it is overloaded (more current through it that it's ratining would allow) or overvolted (you exceeded the Working voltage or WV rating of the capacitor) or got the polarity backward (if it's an electrolytic: the shittiest type of capacitor)

Assuming that you are referring to the popular astable multivibrator configuration; Only if you:a) Get one that can oscillate well into the hundreds or thousands of KHz, depending on the construction of the secondary coil and topload (CMOS variants are faster I believe, but you need to take care with the construction to avoid parasitic loading effects on the output of the 555 timer and buffer the output with additional BJT buffer drivers.)b) Are willing to precisely tune it to the resonant frequency of the secondary (the oscillation frequency of the 555 as well as the resonant frequency of the LC tank circuit between the primary and capacitors directly in parallel with it. And It's hard enough to tune one thing manually. ~OR~ develop a custom 555 circuit that utilizes feedback to create...

Assuming that you are referring to the popular astable multivibrator configuration; Only if you:a) Get one that can oscillate well into the hundreds or thousands of KHz, depending on the construction of the secondary coil and topload (CMOS variants are faster I believe, but you need to take care with the construction to avoid parasitic loading effects on the output of the 555 timer and buffer the output with additional BJT buffer drivers.)b) Are willing to precisely tune it to the resonant frequency of the secondary (the oscillation frequency of the 555 as well as the resonant frequency of the LC tank circuit between the primary and capacitors directly in parallel with it. And It's hard enough to tune one thing manually. ~OR~ develop a custom 555 circuit that utilizes feedback to create a oscillator that can track the resonant frequency of the secondary LC system.

I think you might benifit from watching my 2 Tutorial Tuesday videos to get a better grasp on voltage and current.In short, when you use a low impedance source (where the output voltage does not sag much with increasing current draw) then the load gets to decide the current draw.The slayer exciter will draw more current when you apply more voltage to the input, and the power consumption increases substantally. You may find that your circuit attempts to draw greater than 5A, and your power supply may decrease the output voltage to almost nothing to protect itself. Depends on the supply.

To be unforgivingly honest, I am surprised that the circuit even works. I found that through years of building these types of circuits, that neatness CAN impact the performance and reliability of a circuit.First, rebuild it and consider using much shorter wires and at a minimum a perfboard. We are dealing with RF electronics, which means that every extra millimeter of wiring has some parasitic properties like resistive, inductive, and capacitive effects. So you want to ensure all the connections that carry RF signals are electrically separated, have a ground plane, etc. Also having a mess of wiring means that it's easy to have points short out or signals bleed from one point to another undesirably.-Then I would remove the diode in favor of a "real" diode. Consider a fast schot...

To be unforgivingly honest, I am surprised that the circuit even works. I found that through years of building these types of circuits, that neatness CAN impact the performance and reliability of a circuit.First, rebuild it and consider using much shorter wires and at a minimum a perfboard. We are dealing with RF electronics, which means that every extra millimeter of wiring has some parasitic properties like resistive, inductive, and capacitive effects. So you want to ensure all the connections that carry RF signals are electrically separated, have a ground plane, etc. Also having a mess of wiring means that it's easy to have points short out or signals bleed from one point to another undesirably.-Then I would remove the diode in favor of a "real" diode. Consider a fast schottky diode or at a minimum a 1N4007. I have found that LEDs tend to die when wired in.-As per the capacitor as you asked, it looks fine, so long as you have the polarity correct. If you want to further improve it's ability to reject power supply noise and clean up the DC coming into the circuit, you can add additional, smaller film / MKP capacitors in parelell to it. With values like 0.47uF, 0.1uF, 10nF, and 10pF. Typically the higher capacitor values are better at rejecting higher frequency blips in the DC comming into the circuit. It will very marginally improve performance.

Your choice of transistor can also affect the circuit. You need one that can handle the power levels you desire, and preferably one that can operate well at higher frequencies. This makes the MJE3055 I chose to use for my more powerful design a poor choice, given it's age and slow characteristics.Pretty much any modern transistor that can dissipate 50W of heat and handle at least 60V will be better.

I did eventually end up replacing the whole control board on that micro quad, as I later fried the 3V LDO regulator on it too! (I tried to fix this by using an LED as a shunt regulator, but that failed)Also, to make it so all the motors twitch and to verify the missing resistor on the replaced FET was the cause, I removed all of those resistors. Turns out the purpose of those resistors was to prevent spurious voltages building up on the MOSFET gates before the microcontroller enables those pins as outputs.Worse yet with the old damaged control board, if I crashed hard, the micro would enter a "panic" state (all LEDs synchronously flashing, telling me an error) and the motors would rev to FULL SPEED! I think this is because when it enters this panic state, the micro disables th...

I did eventually end up replacing the whole control board on that micro quad, as I later fried the 3V LDO regulator on it too! (I tried to fix this by using an LED as a shunt regulator, but that failed)Also, to make it so all the motors twitch and to verify the missing resistor on the replaced FET was the cause, I removed all of those resistors. Turns out the purpose of those resistors was to prevent spurious voltages building up on the MOSFET gates before the microcontroller enables those pins as outputs.Worse yet with the old damaged control board, if I crashed hard, the micro would enter a "panic" state (all LEDs synchronously flashing, telling me an error) and the motors would rev to FULL SPEED! I think this is because when it enters this panic state, the micro disables the output pins, and rely's on the pulldown resistors to keep the MOSFETs off. Oops.

You should totally refer to my youtube tutorial and ask there! ;)..jk. Assuming you tried everything in the tutorial section (DO THIS PLEASE) then there is a good chance your MOSFETs are dead or your driver is dead. Build up a basic test circuits and troubleshoot each component. Silicon tends to fail easily, so diodes, transistors, chips, etc.Plenty of tutorials of how to test transistors and MOSFETs, The DS0026 or equivalent chip should produce an inverted output on an osciloscope compared to the input. The output should be able to drive a load with static voltages present on the input.-You should have a read through this to understand why parallel MOSFETs is NOT a good idea if you don't know what you're doing.http://www.irf.com/technical-info/appnotes/an-941....Basically the gist is t...

You should totally refer to my youtube tutorial and ask there! ;)..jk. Assuming you tried everything in the tutorial section (DO THIS PLEASE) then there is a good chance your MOSFETs are dead or your driver is dead. Build up a basic test circuits and troubleshoot each component. Silicon tends to fail easily, so diodes, transistors, chips, etc.Plenty of tutorials of how to test transistors and MOSFETs, The DS0026 or equivalent chip should produce an inverted output on an osciloscope compared to the input. The output should be able to drive a load with static voltages present on the input.-You should have a read through this to understand why parallel MOSFETs is NOT a good idea if you don't know what you're doing.http://www.irf.com/technical-info/appnotes/an-941....Basically the gist is that because no 2 MOSFETs are identical, one will conduct way more current than the other when ON and especially in the linear region of operation. You need current sharing resistors on their drain and gate for reasons explained in that application note.---------------p.s. If you plan to do much more electronics you gotta learn to read up on this stuff! It can get intense, I know. Look into picking up a copy of the Art of Electronics. It has almost everything you would need to know in it!

So then my original point holds true. To truly figure out how much power a regulator can dissipate, you need to do some basic thermal calculations. Different case styles have different thermal resistances. (goto comment 1)TO220 is typically just under 1 *C/W, from the silicon chip inside to the case. If you let the package stand in free air its about 35 *C/W from junction to ambient, depending on air flow.Exceed the thermal and you ARE abusing the part. Thermal cutoff typically occurs at 150*C which is too hot. 100*C is the max for reliable operation

My original comment was simply adding to what you said (apologies if that was mistaken to be a correction), then you argued that you can ballpark it for many applications, which I agree with for typical non-critical DIY projects (particularly when breadboarding and having access to a reasonable size heatsink), but that does not make it good practice. A linear regulator is most often (almost always) limited by thermal dissipation capability, at least in my experience. Sometimes a power derating curve is offered by the datasheet, but this is basically just power dissipation limits calculated for you.I tried to stick a 7805 inside of a small LCD module which was drawing 350mA at 5V. Powered from a 12V RC battery. While on the breadboard mounted on a small heatsink it got a little warm but ...

My original comment was simply adding to what you said (apologies if that was mistaken to be a correction), then you argued that you can ballpark it for many applications, which I agree with for typical non-critical DIY projects (particularly when breadboarding and having access to a reasonable size heatsink), but that does not make it good practice. A linear regulator is most often (almost always) limited by thermal dissipation capability, at least in my experience. Sometimes a power derating curve is offered by the datasheet, but this is basically just power dissipation limits calculated for you.I tried to stick a 7805 inside of a small LCD module which was drawing 350mA at 5V. Powered from a 12V RC battery. While on the breadboard mounted on a small heatsink it got a little warm but not bad. However once assembled the regulator overheated, melted the inside of the case, cause LCD clouding (thermal heat damage) and the regulator died. It was not even close to the rated 5A but I neglected power dissipation inside a plastic case with no ventilation. It was dissipating over 2W of heat.I know linear regulators inside out (Literally!!!), as I have built many linear regs from BJTs on multiple occasions. I am working on a really nice 14 bit microcontroller lab bench power supply capable of 0 -- 5A; 0 --15V. I not have a "beta" build working on a perf-board to improve performance and reduce the changes of marginal instability. I plan to use LT1007's in the final design for the low noise, lower voltage offset, higher precision, and MUCH higher slew rate. Only thing that needs to be done is to layout a proper PCB and figure out frequency compensation components.

Sure, I'd love to see the performance. But does it compare to my MOSFET based SSTC? ;)It is probably worth noting that darlingtons are not the best for high speed switching, as the case with this 1MHz oscillator. A 100 -- 1k resistor between the emitter of the first transistor (also the base of the 2nd) and the emitter will should help improve performance.

Many voltage regulators have protection mechinisms in place, sure. That does not mean you should be careless about how you treat them, I have had many regulators die from abuse from heat and short circuits. They are not fool proof.By "junction", I am referring to the primary pass transistor inside that is the culprit of all the heat.

The datasheet can give you the maximum power dissipation, and that is generally assuming you can keep the case of the package at room temperature, and the junctions will be at the maximum temperature (150*C) Of course in the real world it is almost impossible to achieve like 100W of dissipation while keeping the transistor at 25*C w/o an active heat pump.

Relays can very easily be configured to self oscillate, simply by either connecting the normally open contacts directly parallel with the coil, and having a lamp in series with the coil powered from a source, OR by connecting normally closed contacts in series with a coil, and connecting that to power.You will have high voltage spikes across the coil, and could get a nice tickle-shock from it, probably enough to startle you or blow a multimeter up, both of which I did.The contacts will also wear out very quickly as an arc is drawn when the contacts come apart. I have caused a 50A car relay to melt in this way, and destroyed many smaller ones in seconds. I also used a refined version of this self-oscillating setup to drive and test ignition coils, with great success and 1 inch sparks fro...

Relays can very easily be configured to self oscillate, simply by either connecting the normally open contacts directly parallel with the coil, and having a lamp in series with the coil powered from a source, OR by connecting normally closed contacts in series with a coil, and connecting that to power.You will have high voltage spikes across the coil, and could get a nice tickle-shock from it, probably enough to startle you or blow a multimeter up, both of which I did.The contacts will also wear out very quickly as an arc is drawn when the contacts come apart. I have caused a 50A car relay to melt in this way, and destroyed many smaller ones in seconds. I also used a refined version of this self-oscillating setup to drive and test ignition coils, with great success and 1 inch sparks from a 12V drill battery.

You can also alternatively try making your own MOSFET buffer driver with a couple of transistors. Use 2 (a NPN and PNP) transistors in the emitter follower configuration with the base's connected together and the emitters connected together. The emitters go to the MOSFET gate, and the base is fed from the feedback pin. Due to the nature of PNP and NPN transistors, protection diodes are not critically necessary, as the PN junctions will do the trick. The transistors are acting as emitter followers, so the NPN collector is connected to Vcc and the collector of the PNP is connected to ground.

It's hard to say, I killed all my DS0026's working with this circuit, too. And I have no plan to buy them. (I only used that chip because I had them in my antique junk bins.) Look up the datasheet and have a glance at the Absolute Maximum Ratings for your device, it will list all the things that, if you exceed, will result in the magic smoke.